


Babe, Catch Me, I'm Falling

by a_spark_of_light



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-31
Updated: 2012-12-31
Packaged: 2017-11-23 01:53:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/616760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_spark_of_light/pseuds/a_spark_of_light
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Louis is the falling star that Harry casts wishes upon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Babe, Catch Me, I'm Falling

**Author's Note:**

> This is going to take some willful suspension of disbelief to enjoy, seeing as I wrote it at around 1 in the morning.

_I am the star that has fallen form the sky. Your wish has saved me and I shall save you in return._

The star falls from the sky before him, bright and white, crashing through the dark blanket of night. He closes his eyes, feels the beat of his heart in his chest, rushed and anxious. It spoke to him, told him he didn’t  _need_ this wish, that he didn’t  _deserve_ it. The thought was quickly overrun with blind desire, blind  _want._  All he wanted…all he wanted was to not be so lonely anymore.

————-

Life gets repetitive. You go to work, pretend to move forward in life, clock out, stop at the grocery store, restock the kitchen, go home, make dinner, call mum, tell her you’re still alive, sleep, work, sleep, work, sleep, work. And then your friends go out and they meet people as you stand there, wondering how people even do that. How do they even go out and find someone that they can really fall for and who can really fall for them as well? And then they’re dating. And then they’re proposing. And then they’re married. And you…well, you’re at home on your couch watching reruns of shit soap operas wondering how this has even became your life.

This  _is_  Harry’s life. And he still doesn’t understand how it became such, that being the joys of a life that felt much like a CD with the horrible skipping function, blipping over the same .45 seconds over and over again. Life moved on, people changed, and all his friends went on to do things bigger, better, and there he was, still Harry Styles from Holmes Chapel.

His alarm goes off at 6 in the morning, an annoying buzz that eventually fades into the overly enthusiastic voice of the radio DJ from whatever station he’d left it on the prior night. He rolls over, grumbling to himself, hating the fact that he has somewhere to be while simultaneously hating himself for not having somewhere  _better_ to be. He threw an arm over his eyes, blocking out the sunlight from the curtains that invaded his eye, and lied there taking slow and steady breaths. Perhaps if he ignored the problem for long enough it would go away.

Ten minutes later, he was on his way back to dreamland and his alarm clock went off again, startling out of bed. With a frantic jolt, he rolled off the mattress, dropping heavily onto the cold and hard ground below him. He groaned, rubbing at his sore limbs before pulling himself up to his feet for a shower.

He showers, he eats a bowl of cereal, he gets in his car, and he drives to work. Just like every other day. Just like every  _single_ day. Except today is different. Today there is a man in the street. One moment he’s taking a glance down at the radio to check the time and the next, there’s some crazed guy standing in the middle of the road like a deer in headlights, right in front of Harry’s car.

His foot slams down on the brakes, car swerving slightly as his muscles spasm with his nerves and his body slams forward, seatbelt snapping to pull him back before his chest can make contact with the steering wheel in front of him. His heart races, thudding angrily within his chest as if to say  _‘what the fuck are you doing, man?’_  And really, what the  _fuck_ is he actually doing? Almost running people over in the roads. How is this his life?

With that he remembers the cause of his near accident, the man who was standing in the middle of the road but is now nowhere to be seen now, which is strange. Either the man somehow continued his venture across the lanes or was actually hit.  _Had he hit him?_  Harry really hoped not. He hadn’t gotten as much of a speeding ticket ever since acquiring his license and hitting a random man with his car didn’t really seem like the first tarnish he wanted to have on his once clean driving record.

Oh damn. Harry bet he hit him. His grip tightens on the steering wheel as his mind races with the possibilities of how bad this is. The man couldn’t have been hit too hard. If so Harry would have felt it, right? Unless he was in too much shock when pushing the brakes to notice.  _Oh damn._  He hit the guy and didn’t even notice. And now here he is sitting in his car as that guy was in the process of dying. Here he is in his fucking car listening to fucking Lana Del Rey on the radio as that guy most likely bled out on the streets. He was going to go to prison. Harry Styles was going to go to  _mother fucking prison._

His mind swarms with ideas of what he should be doing at the moment, his first instinct urging him to run. Seriously, he should just put his foot down and floor it until he’s gotten the hell out of dodge. The police wouldn’t be able to chase him if he got a head start, right? ‘ _Yes they would, nimrod’,_  a small voice in his head tells him, ‘ _you’d have a head start, but they’d still catch you and then they’d lengthen your sentence for trying to evade your arrest’._  Oh, yeah. He’d almost forgotten about the part where he was going to mother fucking jail.

He couldn’t go to  _jail_ though. He only  _looked_  like he was tough enough to rough it. He couldn’t _actually_  go through with roughing it. All those hours he spent in the gym were just for show, not so he could  _actually_  learn how to survive on the streets. He was really just a cupcake. An overgrown and gangly  _cupcake_. They’d tear him to pieces in jail and then devour what was left when he ended up in prison.

Maybe he could do something to make this look okay. Yeah, that seemed like a good idea. He’d just go out and check on the guy he hit. He’d take care of him, nurse him to health, and then, 10 years down the line, they’d both look back at this moment and laugh (probably not).

Harry took in a deep breath, letting it out nice and slow, giving himself a mental pep-talk. He could do this. The other guy had only been hit by a car. He couldn’t be  _too_ upset about that, right? There were worse things that could have happened to him. And on the slight chance that the guy was actually angry about having had been hit by a car…well, he’d just been hit by a car. How much of a threat could he be now?

With another deep intake of breath, Harry opened the car door, climbing out, trying to avoid all of the eyes of his fellow drivers who were giving him the evil eye. They were judging him, their gazes boring into his skin, cell phones held in hand as they probably made to call the police (who were most definitely going to revoke his license, tarnish his once perfect driving record, and then put him in mother fucking jail). He moved faster, eyes scanning the ground in front of his vehicle for signs of major blood loss and finding noth- _oh._

There wasn’t a large amount of blood loss. There wasn’t a splattering of guts all over the asphalt or detached limbs. It wasn’t gruesome in the slightest. Well…it wasn’t a completely disgusting sight and Harry could now rest assured that he hadn’t killed anyone, but his mind currently couldn’t seem to get past the thought of  _‘god-damn you’re beautiful’._                                                                                                                           

The man lay sprawled out on the ground in front of his car, arm clutched to his abdomen, face scrunched up in pain, and looking absolutely tiny and vulnerable, though a little worse for wear. There were scratches littered across his cheeks, crusted over with dried blood and small smatterings of dirt. His face was drawn up in pain, eyes scrunched and lips pursed and, really, no one should be able to look that adorable while they were in pain. His hair is a nice soft sandy brown color and swept up into something that’s a cross between bedhead and a quiff, and, damn, by the looks of those sweats and that tattered t-shirt he’s got on Harry thinks he might have just hit a semi-homeless man. On the bright side, though, this was probably the most beautiful semi-homeless man that he’s ever seen in his whole entire lifetime.

The possibly semi-homeless man groans in pain and shifts onto his back, knocking Harry out of his distracted stupor and reminding him of the real problem at hand. “A-are you, alright?” he asks, before cringing and mentally slapping himself.  _‘Are you alright?’_  Of course the man wasn’t alright. He’d just been hit by a  _car_ , not a  _paper airplane_  or something equally as unthreatening. The possibly semi-homeless man lets out a grunt, before curling even further in on himself.

“Alright, then, we can take that as a  _no._  Would you like me to take you to the hospital so you can get some treatment?” he asks, not receiving anything other than another grunt in reply. “Okay, I’ll assume that we can take that as a yes, then.”

He steps closer to the mans bruised body, scooping him up bridal style and attempting to ignore the little corner of his mind that was telling him that he was enjoying this way too much (he can’t help it-it’s not just every day that he gets to go around holding such astoundingly attractive young men). The man is light in his arms, groaning quietly as Harry places him into the passenger seat and buckles him in before sliding over to the wheel.

There’s a part of him that remember that there is probably some legal stuff that he should be going through right now, like possibly waiting for the police to come and clear him out or calling an ambulance to come get this guy, but he ignores it. It’s not like they can arrest him for speeding up the timeline of events and taking a possibly injured guy to the hospital himself. Well, they probably _could,_ but he’d rather not think about that at the moment.

He moves forward, sliding seamlessly out of the slight traffic jam that he’d caused, changing his direction to the nearest hospital. Eyes glance over, taking a swift look at the young man next to him to check his condition, noting that he’s definitely worse for wear. It isn’t in the sense of ‘oh, I’m a little banged up after getting hit by a car’ but more of an ‘I’ve been beat up for a while now and am long overdue for a visit to the hospital’ which is both a blessing and a curse for Harry. He now knows that he isn’t the  _main_  cause of this guy’s pain, but in return he’s got to live with the fact that this guy’s obviously been hurting for a while and no one’s been there to help him out.

He parks his car in front of the white building and pulls the man out of the passenger seat before heading into the ER. He stands there a little confused for a moment until he catches the attention of a nearby nurse who calls for a gurney. In less than 5 minutes the man is taken from his arms and wheeled down the corridors of the hospital. He’s got a clipboard in hand and is sitting in a poorly cushioned waiting room chair and, once again, Harry Styles is wondering how this is even his life.

He doesn’t fill out a majority of the paperwork, unable to even identify the name or age. All he was really aware of was that the guy may or may not have been hit by his car (hopefully the latter) and was possibly semi-homeless. That isn’t really enough information to give to the hospital people, but he figures that can all be sorted out after the man he’d possibly hit wakes up and/or becomes more lucid (really, whichever happens first is good enough for him-he has no preference).

3 hours pass in the waiting room and he wonders what they could possibly be doing back there. It isn’t like it’s a busy day or anything like that. It’s 10:30 on a Thursday morning and the place is practically empty. Were all the workers on their lunch breaks? Did they run out of beds?  Or was the man’s condition  _really_  that bad? He had work to be at and had  _things_  to do. Okay, that was a lie. He’d called in sick a half hour into his stint in the waiting room and didn’t have any plans today that didn’t involve a couch and television, but his eyes were beginning to droop and these chair were not made for sleeping in.

At some point in time he must have fallen asleep, as he is woken up by a woman dressed up in scrubs calling his name off from a clipboard. “Harry Styles,” she says again, and he’s finally lucid enough to get out of his chair and see what they have in store for him. She gives him a quick once over when he arrives before delving off into some tangent about how the guy he’d hit wasn’t talking except for asking for him and wondering if they could get him to retrieve the rest of his information or summat.

He nods before following her out the doors of the waiting room and into the new room where they have the possibly semi-homeless man at. He’s lying on the bed, back propped up with some pillows and tubes coming out of his nose, bandages on his bruised skin. His thin lips are dry and cracked, eyes shut gently and his long lashes flutter softly against his cheeks and he looks all frail yet appears to be nearly luminescent at the same time and- _damn, that man is beautiful._

Harry pulls a chair up to the bed and sits down and just looks at him unashamedly as the nurses footsteps fade off into the distance. The man in the bed’s face twitches, eyebrows knitting together, face drawing up before he turns to him. “Is she gone?” he whispers and his voice is soft and raspy when he speaks and it’s like nothing Harry has ever heard before.

He looks over his shoulder before turning back to the bed and nodding. “Yeah,” he answers, “she’s gone.”

“Good,” say the man, his eyes flying open, a clear blue color like the sea and the sky at the same time. He moves himself further up the bed and into a sitting position, eyes roaming over his body curiously as if he was seeing himself for the very first time. He raises his hands closer to his face, inspecting them carefully, turning them over, clenching his hands into fists, and then spreading all the fingers apart, giving them all a quick wiggle.  _“Hmmm.”_

“Is something wrong?” Harry asks curiously. The man looks well off enough, but there might be something that he had missed.

“Fingers,” the man whispers to him, before thrusting his hands into Harry’s face. “Fingers!” He’s got a wicked grin stretched across his thin lips, eyes dancing with excitement as he wiggles all ten of them once more.

Harry takes one of the hands in his own, carefully, as to not upset the man and observes him themselves. They look fine to him, small and dainty in his grasp. They’re nice hands, he supposes, but he’s not exactly sure what the fanfare was over them is.

Before he can comment, the hands are ripped out of his grasp, the man shucking off his covers and thrusting his legs over the side of the bed in amazement. “Toes!” the man exclaims, voice still hushed as he wiggles the small appendages, turning to Harry as if he’d just experienced the secret of life and was only intending to share it with Harry Styles himself.

“Yes,” Harry answers slowly, “Fingers and toes. I’ve got them as well.”

“Why, yes,” the replies, smile still stretched widely over his face. “Why, yes, you do.”

Harry begins to wonder if this man is entirely there, if there may be a few screws lose or if he’s missing some of the colors essential to having a few set in the crayon box. Perhaps that’s why he was in the street. Because he is batshit crazy. Or maybe, this craziness was something that was new to surface and he’d hit his head when he’d fallen down. Yeah, he’d probably just hit his noggin a bit too hard on the ground, that’s all.

“So,” Harry began, searching around in his head for the most politically correct way to ask someone how many branches they hit on the way down from the cuckoo tree. “How are you?”

“Lovely,” the man answers. “Or at least I am now. I wasn’t quite so lovely a while ago.”

“Oh, yeah,” Harry replies, wincing slightly. He had forgotten for a moment that he was actually a factor in why or why not that man may not be at his 100% seeing as he may or may not have nearly ran him over with his car. “Sorry about that.”

“About what?” asks the man, frowning in confusion as he finally stops looking at his hands as if they had delivered Jesus from the womb and turned to look at Harry.

“For hitting you with my car,” Harry answers nervously, receiving no reaction other than a blank look. “It happened a couple of hours ago…” Still no reaction. “You know, when you were in the street and… _oh god,_  I really  _did_ hit you and now you have a concussion and are suffering from memory loss.”

“Wha-”

“I’m sorry,” Harry concedes, before the man even has a chance to go off on him. “I didn’t mean to hit you. I only wanted to know what time it was and I just took one quick glance at my radio and then you were there in the road and… _god,_  I didn’t mean to hit you. You were just there-and now I sound like I was actually intending to hit someone and got you instead-which I promise I wasn’t. I-I, oh, you’re going to call the cops now, aren’t you. They’re going to come and arrest me and tarnish my perfect driving record and take me to  _jail_. I can’t go to-”

“ _Woah, woah_ ,” the man in the bed finally interjected. “What are you talking about? I didn’t get hit by your car.”

“Yes,” Harry insists. “Yes you did. You just don’t remember because I knocked the memory out of you.”

“I don’t believe that’s what happened. I think the doctor would have said so if I did. I’m pretty concussion free.”

“Th-then what happened?” Harry asks.

“I fell,” the man answers simply.

“Fell?” Harry repeats. He isn’t completely positive, but that sounds a little bit like something that could infer some brain damage.

“Yeah-it’s just…well…”

“Well…”

“I don’t think you’d exactly  _understand._ ”

“Try me,” Harry retorts.

“Are you sure?” the man asks, looking into his lap, fingers gripping onto the sheets tightly. “If I tell you, then you can’t call me a liar.”

“I won’t,” Harry answers. The man still looks a bit unsure of himself, so he flashes him a reassuring smile. “ _I promise_.”

“Alright then,” the man replies. “So basically what happened is that I fell from the sky and crashed into a nearby park and woke up like this.”

Harry blinked slowly, unable to fully understand. That story wasn’t  _too_ bad. Not  _too_ unbelievable, he supposed. “So you fell?” he asks anyways, just to clear things up.

The man nods gravely.

“Like, from a plane or something?”

He shakes his head before giving Harry an inquisitive glance. “ _No,_  I fell from the sky.”

“From the sky?”

“From the sky.”

“The  _sky_?”

“Yeah, the  _sky._ ”

They sit in stony silence as Harry rolls that thought around a bit in his head, trying to make sense of it. Perhaps “sky” was code for something. Or perhaps that guy really  _is_  absolutely mental. “So the-”

 _“Yes,”_  the man snaps. “The actual for real night sky.”

That makes no sense to Harry, but he doesn’t want to outright say that. He’s beginning to get the feeling that this man isn’t really a fan of his questions, but really… “Are you  _sure_?”

“Yes, I’m  _sure_ ,” the man hisses back. “Falling from the sky isn’t really a complicated enough concept for me to be  _unsure_ of it.”

“It’s just,” Harry begins, looking for the best way to phrase his thoughts. “It doesn’t really seem to make all of that much sense.”

“It makes  _plenty_  sense,” the man answers, fully glaring up at Harry now, eyes burning harshly.

They sit in silence once more, this one much tenser than the first before the man breaks it. “Give me your hand,” he orders.

“Wha-”

“Your hand,” he repeats, impatiently. “We don’t have all day.”

“Bu-”

“Do I have to do everything myself?” the man mutters to himself and a second later his small hands are wrapped around Harry’s larger ones, fingers burning so hot into his skin that it’s almost painful. It’s a steady buzzing, like a butterfly’s wings swatting against every inch of his skin, before the heat envelops his whole body.

In front of him, the man is glowing a soft gold, as if emitting his own personal beam of light and once again Harry is taken with thoughts of how one person could honestly be that beautiful. “Close your eyes,” he whispers and Harry complies without question. For a moment they sit there in silence and he simply feels. Feels the warmth brushing up against his skin, the frantic thrumming of the adrenaline within his veins, and the thud of his heart within his chest. And then he’s falling.

The ground is snatched out from under his feet, stomach plummeting as he begins to drop. The wind whips mercilessly at his face, claws at his skin as all of his internal organs attempt to rearrange themselves in his body. It’s too much all at once and he opens his mouth to scream, to shout out for someone, anyone, to help him. The scream never comes out, stuck tight in throat, bottled up within him and the only thing that is released is terror as he realizes that he’s going down, down,  _down._  He’s falling and he’s going to hit the ground blindly and without any warning.

And then, it suddenly all stops. The ground slams back underneath his feet as if it had never left in the first place and his knees buckle under the force. He falls forward with a sharp cry, landing heavily onto the land below him. It’s wet and prickly and quite uncomfortable as his eyes finally fly open to get a look at the space around him.

The first thing he makes out is that it’s dark. Pitch black, save for the few stars dotting the night sky, illuminating the field of blackness just enough for him to be able to make out his hands in front of his face. The second thing he notices is where he is, that being lying face down in a patch of damp grass and dirt. The third thing he notices is the soft warmth beside him. He rolls onto his back, groaning at the pain that came with the shock of his fall and, sure enough, there is the man standing over him, once more emitting that soft glow from his skin.

The man extends a hand out, which Harry takes, body shivering as the heat slides down his arm from his fingers until it’s coating his whole body in its warmth. He rises to his feet and is about to ask the man what exactly is going on only to be stopped by a hand slapping over his mouth. The man raises his finger to his lips, shushing him silently before pulling him forward.

There’s a lot of grass and trees around them and- _oh_ they’re on a sidewalk now. And… _oh,_  they’re in a park. They follow the paved path until they come upon a bench that the man urges him to sit on. He raises an eyebrow in question, receiving a simple nod in return before finally sitting down. The man sits beside him and draws his finger to his lips again, shushing him even has the chance to think of anything to say. He nods his head up at the sky signaling for Harry to watch.

Bright and white, a star falls from the sky, slicing through the dark night, tail dragging lazily behind it. It burns hot, trailing closer and closer to them until he can almost feel it. He makes to move out the way, but the iron grip of them man next to him keeps him still until the light of the star fades away. And then there is a crash. The star hits the earth, sending it trembling underneath his feet. It’s silent for a few moments and then…a soft glow fills the area followed by a weak sputtering as a man rises to his feet in the distance.

He’s bleeding, face and limbs scratched  up as he takes a weary step forward, fingers clutching desperately at his abdomen and chest as he wheezes for air. He’s got sandy brown hair wisped over his head in a sort of bedhead-quiff combo and when he opens his clear blue eyes to look at Harry it’s like fire. This man is beautiful. So startlingly beautiful. And in a split second it’s over as the glow of the man disappears and all that is left is Harry and the man next to him on the bench.

Harry turns to the man next to him, brows knit in confusion. “I-I…” He doesn’t know what he intends to say. And even if he did, he’s not sure he’d be able to even get the words out.

The man gives him a shy smile, taking his hand in his smaller ones and says simply, “I fell.”

 


End file.
